


family business

by riverrun



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Allison Argent is more of a badass than you, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Supernatural (TV) Fusion, Argent family feels, Hale Family Feels, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Multi, Stilinski Family Feels
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-17
Updated: 2014-01-17
Packaged: 2018-01-09 00:35:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1139360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riverrun/pseuds/riverrun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Stiles,” Allison snaps, and that’s not anger, it’s urgency. “It’s your dad. He’s missing.”</p><p>“Missing?” he says, and stops walking, because: missing. In their world, missing doesn’t mean gone off on some bender, or needed space. Missing means radio silence, and danger, and bleeding out in some dark corridor or lying dead in an abandoned mine shaft because you shot too slow or didn’t bring enough backup. If Allison’s here, missing is bad. </p><p>He finds his voice again. “How long?”</p><p>She sighs, long and low. “Two weeks,” she says reluctantly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	family business

**Author's Note:**

> A Supernatural fusion AU, beginning with the premise that Claudia Stilinski's maiden name was Argent.
> 
> I started writing this because I love Allison Argent and all I want in life is more Allison and Stiles friendship. Then I rewatched the pilot episode of Supernatural and thought, "Someone should mash this up with Teen Wolf." So I did, only it ran away from me. 
> 
> See endnotes for trigger warnings.

Stiles was ten when his mom died and his world became so deeply horrible that it sometimes feels like a giant cosmic joke, like if he could just shake himself awake he would either find out that he’d been living in some kind of nightmare or that all the old vengeful Greek gods were lined up on Mount Olympus, laughing their divine asses off as they watched the mortals struggle and squirm and die like ants. Except that’s a really stupid metaphor, because if there’s one thing Stiles has learned in the past twelve years, it’s that no one divine is actually watching out for him, or for anyone else. He may live in a world of werewolves and ghosts and selkies and vengeful vampires, but believing there’s some kind of divine plan for anyone’s life feels a little too much like a fairy tale.

Stiles’ mother doesn’t leave the world peacefully, or normally, or in any way that can be explained to anyone not part of his screwed up little subculture. She dies screaming, pinned to the ceiling of Stiles’ own bedroom by some unseen, unnatural force, engulfed in flames that he tries to extinguish with his own hands even as his father pulls him back down the stairs, yelling at him not to be stupid. The fire consumes their house, nearly spreads to the neighborhood (California is wildfire country, after all) and if it wasn’t such a freaking cliche Stiles might say it consumes his life, too.

Because it turns out that his mother’s estranged family spent their lives hunting down things that go bump in the night, and that one of those things had finally caught up to her, even though she’d abandoned the life long ago. Stiles found out all of this after the funeral, when his mom’s brother, his Uncle Chris, had sat in their car next to Stiles’ father and explained everything to him in excruciating detail.

Stiles had eavesdropped until his father sent him to sleep over with his then-best friend, Scott McCall. Mrs. McCall had let them stay up all night playing video games, even though Stiles knew Mr. McCall complained about the noise. In the morning she’d driven Stiles home, and they’d gotten into Chris Argent’s SUV and driven off into a new, horrible life, with everything that Stiles used to love still smoking on the horizon.

 

///

It’s Friday night, and Stiles is halfway to being really, really drunk, hovering in that pleasant cocoon of warm buzz that makes you feel like the world is a great place to live in. It doesn’t hurt that he just got paid, and that he’s surrounded by friends and coworkers, and that everything has started to feel like it’s going right in his life, for once. Of course, that’s when it happens. He’s headed back from the bar, weaving through the crowd and holding the round he’s just purchased aloft so he doesn’t accidentally spill it all over some over-eager undergraduate, when he sees her. Her back is to him; she’s just some wavy dark hair talking to Brett, and really it could be any pretty girl, because come on, Stiles, it’s a huge city, but he knows, immediately, that it’s her and that his old life has followed him here. There are some things you just can’t shake, no matter how hard you try.

Brett saves him the trouble of making any awkward introductions. “Stilinski!” he hails him, waving Stiles over. “Someone here looking for you.”

Stiles had never bothered hiding his identity here. He’d registered for college under his real, legal name. At the time it had seemed like one more grand fuck-you to the paranoid way of life he’d been leaving behind, but now he wonders if it wasn’t because maybe, all along, he was waiting for a moment like this.

Allison Argent turns around and smiles at him, briefly. Her eyes flicker over him, examining, cataloguing, and he knows his are doing the same. She doesn’t look any different: still pretty, still fierce. She’s wearing a tan leather jacket and her hair’s loose. He wonders what she sees. His buzzcut has long since grown out and he’s taller, more muscle on his frame even though he’s still skinny. They haven’t seen each other in four years, not since he and his dad had that last, screaming fight, the one where he’d said, “You’re crazy. You’re ruining our lives.” And his dad had said, “We are your family. This is your life. You belong here.” Then he had said that he didn’t care, that he wanted to get an education, for god’s sake, like a normal person, and his father had said, flatly: “If you leave again, don’t bother coming back.”

So he hadn’t.

“How do you know each other?” Brett yells over the music. Stiles can tell he’s trying to decide if Allison is an ex-girlfriend (in which case, off limits) or just a friend (in which case, Brett can buy her a drink).

“I’m his sister,” Allison says to Brett, her eyes daring Stiles to challenge the lie. He doesn’t; it’s one they’ve used dozens of times before. They don’t really look alike, but not all siblings do, and they’ve got enough genetic material in common that no one usually questions it.

“Sister?” Brett says, skepticism and curiosity coloring his tone. Stiles has never mentioned his family at all, preferring to let others fill in the blanks with their own imagination.

“I’m Jessica,” Allison says, offering Brett a hand and a practiced smile, one that has caused more than one man —and woman— to suddenly lose their train of thought. “Let me guess— he’s never mentioned me.”

“Nope,” Brett says, grinning. Sister is a category he hasn’t dealt with before; he’s trying to decide if Stiles will kill him if he makes a pass at her. Little does he know that, of the two of them, he should definitely be more worried about Allison.

“That’s Stiles,” Allison says, tone light, casual. “Always keeping secrets.”

She turns to give Stiles a significant look. “I need to talk to you,” she says. “I went by your house and your roommate said you might be here.”

“I’m here,” he says. “Can it wait?” Not that it matters. Her presence here has already killed whatever buzz he has going on. He might as well get it over with.

“No,” Allison says, and takes his elbow in an iron grip. “It can’t.”

“See you around,” she says to Brett, and leaves him behind with his mouth hanging open while she hauls Stiles through the crowd and back out the door into the cool night. It’s January, but Texas in January is never as cold as you think it’s going to be, and there’s always at least one week where you can get away with no jacket, at least during the day.

Stiles waits until they’re out of the bar and walking before he wrenches himself out of her grip. She lets him go without comment, and he feels all his pent-up anger simmer to the surface.

“Look,” he says, not bothering to hide the irritation in his voice. “What are you doing here?”

“I needed to see you,” she says. She sounds irritated, too, her voice low and intent.

“Nice of you to drop by after all these years,” he says, drawing out his words with lazy sarcasm, just to annoy her. Like they’re twelve again and squabbling in some motel room, not twenty-three and practically strangers.

“Stiles,” Allison snaps, and that’s not anger, it’s urgency. “It’s your dad. He’s missing.”

“Missing?” he says, and stops walking, because: missing. In their world, missing doesn’t mean gone off on some bender, or needed space. Missing means radio silence, and danger, and bleeding out in some dark corridor or lying dead in an abandoned mine shaft because you shot too slow or didn’t bring enough backup. If Allison’s here, missing is bad.

He finds his voice again. “How long?”

She sighs, long and low. “Two weeks,” she says reluctantly.

 

///

Inside his apartment, Allison prowls around like some kind of cat, touching his things, looking out the kitchen window, perusing his DVD collection. It makes him twitchy, but he holds his tongue.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” he tells her. “I’ve been out of the loop for a while.”

That’s because the loop is a fucking noose, and it will choke the life out of you if you let it.

“I want you to come with me,” she says. “To help me find him.”

“He could be dead,” he tells her, even though the words make him feel sick, make his heart start to stutter with panic and his lungs feel too tight. He learned early that it was useless to pretend. The world is the way that it is. You wanting or hoping that it’s going to be different won’t change it.

“He’s not dead,” Allison says, patient. She’s been insistent on this point; there’s something she knows that she’s keeping from him. That’s fine, he can wait her out. She’ll tell him when she’s good and ready.

“What are you doing down here, anyway?” she says, meaning Austin. Meaning Texas. Meaning the world of people who don’t believe that vampires are real.

“I’m being normal,” he tells her. “You should try it sometime. It’s kind of fun.”

“Bullshit,” she says. “You’re a member in good standing of the local coven. That’s not exactly normal.” He doesn’t ask how she knows that. She wouldn’t tell him anyway.

“Magic’s different,” he says, because it is, in ways he is never going to be able to explain. Allison doesn’t have a magic bone in her body, but Uncle Chris used to say that Stiles took after his mom in this. She could sing the birds down from the trees, according to him. It sounded like a useless talent, and also made his mom sound like some kind of freaking Snow White Disney princess, which she had definitely not been. Uncle Chris was always weird about mom, like he remembered her frozen in time at seventeen, when she ran away, rather than a grown ass woman with a wicked smile and a quick temper and an ever-ready sassy comeback, the woman she’d been when she died. They all missed her, but they were missing different people.

When he’d left for college and started over, he hadn’t been able to leave magic behind. It was something that linked him to her, the ability to spin light into being in his hands, to coax things out of the soil, green and becoming. It hadn’t hurt that Austin had a long growing season and that his backyard had been a tangle of wild plants, begging for attention.

“So how’s normal?” Allison asks, surveying his apartment with open curiosity.

“It’s good,” he says, because it is.

“Did you finish college?” she asks, running her finger along the spines of the books that line one of the living room’s many bookshelves. This one is heavy and groaning with textbooks, some his, some belonging to the other people that live here. Stiles’ room is upstairs. It’s tiny and cramped and has no closets to speak of, because the house was built in 1920, but the window looks out into the backyard.

“I did,” he says. “I’m taking a year off before I go to grad school.”

“A year off?” she says, blankly, like the idea is bizarre. To her, it probably is. No one in their family has the kind of job you can leave behind. It’s more of a lifestyle thing; a long-time commitment.

He clears his throat. “So why do you think Dad is alive? And why is he not answering your calls?”

She shakes her head. “I wish I knew. We were supposed to meet up, and I waited two days at the rendezvous point before I started looking for him.”  
Rendezvous point. Jesus, she sounds like a bad video game movie.

So does he.

“Did you try talking to our associates?” Talking in code is second nature at this point, drilled into them by Uncle Chris’ paranoia. After he died, Stiles’ dad had kept it up, insisting you could never be too careful.

“No one’s heard a thing,” she says. “The job he was working was open and shut. A visitor. The locals said he left on time, and nothing was wrong as far as they could see.” A visitor was a poltergeist. And if he’d left on time to meet with Allison and disappeared en route, then something really was wrong.

“I’ll come with you,” he says, and the carefully blank look on her face says that she knew all along that he would. “I just have to pack.”

She follows him up the stairs into his bedroom, cat-footed even though everything in the house creaks. He starts throwing things into a duffel bag, making mental lists of who he’ll call to cover his shifts at the used bookstore cum magic shop where he works, trying to figure how long he’ll be out of town. He packs some magical paraphernalia, a hunting knife. He hesitates, then pulls his SIG Sauer out of the space between mattress and bed. All his roommates are staunchly anti-gun (welcome to Austin, the New York of Texas) but none of them are likely to be rummaging through his mattress. He likes the SIG, too, always has: plenty of bullets, no safety. It’s a weapon that leaves little room for error.

“I traced his phone,” Allison says, idly paging through one of Stiles’ notebooks. He resists the urge to snatch it out of her hands like he’s still fourteen.

“He can’t have been hiding too carefully if he was that sloppy,” he says instead. This is the thing she’s been keeping behind, until she was sure of him.

She quirks an eyebrow at him. “It was a backup phone,” she says. “He’s not that sloppy. I’m just that good.”

“So where is he?” Stiles says. “I thought you said he disappeared.”

“He did,” she says. “He ditched the backup phone and he hasn’t been answering any calls. But I last traced him to Brookdale.”

“Brookdale?” Stiles repeats. The name is ringing a bell, though he can’t place it.

“It’s 30 miles outside of Beacon Hills, Stiles,” Allison says. Her eyes are soft with something that might be compassion. “He’s going back home.”

///

Allison’s profile in the driver’s seat is uncanny, both familiar and unfamiliar. He’s been on plenty of road trips with Al before— his life for almost nine years was road trips with her, and his dad, and Uncle Chris— but this feels wrong, the two of them in the front seat and no one complaining about their choice of music from the back. He can remember vividly the first time he ever rode in a car with her, him sitting shell shocked in the backseat, still wearing the stupid suit from his mother’s funeral, the one that smelled wrong and too new. His dad had hardly spoken from the passenger side in front of him, answering Uncle Chris’ questions in a monotone. Stiles hadn’t been able to keep from sneaking glances at Allison, who was sitting next to him as calmly as if they’d been going on a family outing to the zoo, like she got new family members every day and wasn’t surprised at all to be in the backseat of her father’s SUV with a new cousin and a couple hundred rounds of ammo. Knowing Allison, she probably hadn’t been.

Stiles, on the other hand— Well, in the beginning he had been grieving, too shell shocked to process the strangeness under the raw edge of his pain. Later, it had already settled into a routine, driving to strange places, sleeping in motels and old moldy houses, waiting long hours with Allison behind locked doors, hoping that their dads returned with limbs intact and that whatever the hell they were hunting didn’t come clawing through the door in the absence of any parental supervision. Allison had been raised to this kind of life, as had Stiles’ mother, but Stiles hadn’t known monsters were real until it was far too late. He hadn’t even known he had cousins, had only clued in to the existence of his shady Uncle Chris after overhearing an occasional late night conversation between his parents.

“I don’t want him here,” from his mother.

“He’s your brother,” his father had replied.

Once, she had said softly, “I left that all behind.”

“You don’t have to leave everything behind,” his dad had said, but it had turned out that what was really true was that you couldn’t leave anything behind. Some things, like family and monsters and death, would always find you no matter where you ran.

So Stiles hadn’t known his mother’s family, and his father’s was all gone except for some cousins out in Idaho that sent occasional holiday cards and reunion invites. It had never mattered. Other people had large families, but his had always been a perfect trinity of the three of them, and he had never felt like he was lacking anything, right up until the moment that fate broke him wide open.

What had been really ironic was that, in the backseat of Chris’ car at age ten, he had dared to hope that maybe this new family would help fill in some of those pieces he hadn’t known he was missing. Like how if he didn’t have his mom, he at least had something close to that sibling he’d so famously asked Santa for at age five. The problem with Stiles’ life wasn’t that Allison didn’t act like his sister. The problem was that she wasn’t his sister, and she wouldn’t recognize that and go away when he wanted her to.

“So what’s the plan?” he asks, somewhere in the middle of the night. West Texas is so flat that the landscape looks like the end of the world, a smooth sea of desert and cactus in the moonlight.

“There are some old motels out by the Preserve,” she says. “We can stay there. That’s where dad used to stay, when he came through.”

Allison is always very unemotional when she mentions her father. It’s her way of coping with trauma, Stiles thinks. As if he knows. He went to some free university counseling right after starting college, thinking it might help with the panic attacks and sleeplessness. He made it through three sessions before he dropped out. There aren’t a lot of ways to explain why you sleep with a knife under your pillow, or why your roommate’s footsteps always make your jerk awake in a cold sweat and fumble for a weapon.

And maybe Allison’s way of dealing with trauma is as good as his. She doesn’t seem to bear any resentment towards Stiles or his dad for the fact that they couldn’t save Chris, and she never mentions the night he bled out in her arms, in the middle of a forest in Indiana. Maybe it’s because she was raised to this life, knowing that everyone could go at any minute, and that it probably wasn’t going to be peaceful or easy when it happened. Stiles doesn’t know how his Aunt Victoria died— he never met her— but he suspects it was just as brutal.

“You think Dad’s there?” he asks, instead of dwelling on the past.

“It’s as good a place as any to start looking,” she says.

///

 

They trade off driving and arrive at the motel around evening, just when the air is starting to get colder and the sun is lingering on the horizon. Stiles waits with the car while Allison goes to get the keys to their room. If his dad has been here, she’ll weasel it out of the desk clerk. If he hasn’t been, she’ll get them a room anyway.

The motel is dismal. It was clearly intended to be some kind of summer camper paradise when it was built back in the seventies, and right now it looks like something out of an old horror movie. It’s all one-story, wooden cabins sharing long porches and clumped together in groups of three and four. He can smell the mold from the parking lot, and is just trying to decide how many people have actually been murdered here when Allison emerges from the office, walking briskly.

“He’s been here,” she says. “Paid up through the month, clerk hasn’t seen him in a while. I got us the room next to his.”

They unload their suitcases into the room. It’s as disgusting as Stiles expected, complete with ancient carpet and mysterious stains in the bathtub. Mercifully, there’s two beds, so he doesn’t have to spend the night sleeping next to Allison and making incest jokes stolen from Arrested Development.

They go to dinner at a nearby diner. Now it’s only a matter of waiting for it to get dark enough for them to break into Dad’s cabin. They have plenty of time to kill. The diner is one Stiles never set foot in during his ten years here, but it’s nice enough. There are plenty of cars in the parking lot; mostly family vehicles, though Stiles stops to admire a particularly nice Camaro parked at the back.

Dinner is less awkward than it could be. Neither of them have lost their relish for either burgers or curly fries, and Allison fills him in on some funny stories he’s missed over the past few years. He returns the favor, making her laugh with stories about dorm room antics and some of the hippies in his coven. It’s nice, in a way. It feels almost normal, like he’s back where he belongs. He keeps expecting to look over his shoulder and see his dad trying to wheedle some pie out of the waitress, despite the fact that he knows he should be watching his cholesterol. Hunting’s dangerous enough without adding poor diet into the mix.

Back in the car, Allison rests her hands on the steering wheel before saying, “We should drive by. Just in case.”

“Yeah,” he says, past the lump in his throat.

He doesn’t know what he expects when they pull onto his old street. His palms are a little sweaty, his breath coming fast and hard. The house looks like any other house. It’s been repainted. The upper bedroom has been rebuilt. There’s no sign of the fire.

“It looks peaceful,” he says, finally. They’ve parked outside, cut the lights, but it’s only a matter of time before someone calls the cops. He wonders if any of them would recognize him, either by sight or by name. He looks a lot like his mom, after all.

“Yeah,” Allison says. They both look at the neat, manicured lawn in the moonlight. There’s a basketball goal out front that wasn’t there before, and some kid has left a baseball glove in the middle of the driveway.

“I always remember it being totally destroyed,” he says. “But it was only a fire in the one room.”

Allison frowns. “There was another house that burned,” she says. “That night. It was the season for fires.”

“Yeah,” he says. Memories do that, sometimes, get all mixed up in your head. Some things remain crystal clear, others he only pictures because they’ve been told and retold a thousand times: how his father found him upstairs, staring at the flames, unable to breathe, terrified. How he carried him downstairs, how he went back up but it was too late. How the firetrucks came and put out the fire. He remembers Scott’s arm around him, the color of Scott’s shoelaces next to his bare feet. But the rest of that night is a kaleidoscope, really, just images slotting into place, changing shape and changing color. His memories gain clarity afterwards, once his new life began. He’s always figured that was his brain’s way of telling him they’d started over. New era. B.F. and A.F. Before and after fire.

“He’s not here,” he tells Allison. They both knew he wouldn’t be, really, but he guesses they needed the excuse to give them courage to go and look. At least he did, and he’s grateful to Allison for pretending along with him.

She starts up the car, takes the long way back to the motel.

 

///

They come back to find a crowd waiting for them on their front porch. Their row of cabins isn’t visible from the office. It’s convenient for breaking and entering purposes, but it’s looking less convenient right now. The door to their room faces directly into the woods and no one else is staying in this motel except a guy Stiles is sure is some kind of serial killer, so there’s no one to remark the sudden uptick in visitors.

Allison swears under her breath before she cuts the engine. None of the figures even move when the headlights swing across them; it’s like they’re not even surprised.

“What the hell?” Stiles asks. He’s carrying his gun but suddenly is worried that it’s really, really not going to be enough.

“It’s the Hales,” Allison says, then adds, unnecessarily, “Werewolves.”

Stiles knew the Hales, or of them, when he lived in Beacon Hills. They had a lot of kids (Cora was his year in school) and lived out by the Preserve. Had a lot of money, kept to themselves.

He remembers Allison saying, “It was the season for fires,” and feels a little sick. The Hales had an electrical fire the same night his mom died. The whole house burned, and a lot of the family with it. He hadn’t known they were werewolves at the time, but Allison had told him later.

“Get ready,” Allison says, unbuckling her seatbelt. “This could go south fast.”

The wolves don’t say anything as Allison and Stiles approach, waiting instead for them to make the first move. Stiles tries and fails to control the uptick in his heartbeat. He can’t help the adrenaline; it’s been forever since he’s had to deal with this kind of shit.

“Alpha,” Allison says, nodding towards the woman in front of everyone, who must be Laura, the oldest Hale kid. She’s flanked on either side by men. One of them is impossibly tall and broad, wearing an expression of impassive calm. The other, Stiles’ height, has to be her brother, Derek: dark haired and muscular, with cheekbones and stubble. If he weren’t about to murder Stiles and his last living relative, he might call him attractive. There are a few other pack members behind them, but Stiles can’t really make them out in the shadows.

“Argent,” Laura says, and her voice indicates that this is definitely not a friendly meeting. It might be speciest to say so, but she definitely hisses the word. Like many supernatural creatures, werewolves live in a precarious balance with hunters. There’s always the threat that hunting families will intervene if the wolves can’t police their own. Unfortunately, this sometimes —often— spills over into violence on both sides. They once visited a town where the local seethe of vampires had been in a war with hunters for almost ten years. It was brutal, and Stiles really doesn’t want to replicate that dynamic here.

“What are you doing in our territory?” Laura Hale asks, impatiently. She’s terrifying, even discounting the backup she’s brought with her.

Allison doesn’t back down. “We’re just passing through. We don’t mean you any harm, and we won’t interfere with you if we can help it.” She crosses her arms over her chest and lifts her chin. Laura will be able to hear if she’s lying.

It doesn’t seem to help. “Your aunt murdered our family,” the alpha says, and woah, that is a ridiculous accusation. He responds before he can really help it, the rawness of the emotional wound granting fury to his voice.

“What are you talking about? My mom would never—”

Allison cuts him off without looking at him. “They’re not talking about your mom, Stiles. They’re talking about Aunt Kate.”

“Aunt Kate?” he asks, flummoxed. He’s never heard of this person, but his family has a past history of bringing forth surprise relatives, so he can’t say he’s shocked.

“You’re the Sheriff’s kid,” Laura says, looking at him with sudden interest.

“My cousin,” Allison says. “Stiles.”

“Stiles?” Derek speaks, and his voice is deep and a little amused. “What kind of name is Stiles?”

Stiles has heard that joke his whole life, so the answer rolls off of his tongue. “The kind of name you come up with when the real name your parents saddled you with is too terrible to bear repeating. And you’re a werewolf named Derek, so you don’t have a lot of room to talk.”

There’s a moment of shocked silence that greets his outburst. Derek, though, Derek looks like he’s entertained, and he shrugs in agreement, not offering any retort. Laura looks considering; the big guy’s expression hasn’t changed.

Next to him, Stiles knows that Allison is about to go all badass hunter, channeling her father and talking in menacing riddles. Fuck that. Stiles isn’t a hunter anymore, hasn’t been in years. The Hales don’t look like they’re going to kill them on the spot, and he wants to find his dad and get home before he loses his job.

“We’re actually looking for my dad,” he says, before Allison can stop him. “The Sheriff. Or the used-to-be Sheriff. John Stilinski. Though God only knows what name he’s going by at the moment.”

Allison elbows him, and the gesture doesn’t go unnoticed. Laura Hale raises an eyebrow. “Why are you looking for your father?” she asks.

“Stiles,” Allison says in warning, but Stiles ignores her and forges gamely on. “He was supposed to meet up with Allison and he disappeared. We tracked him to this motel. Do you have any idea where he could be? The sooner we find him in one piece, the sooner we can leave.”

Laura exchanges a glance with Derek. They seem to be engaging in some kind of wordless communication, because after a second, she nods.

“Why should we help you?” she asks. “There’s not a lot of love lost between your family and mine.”

This time, it’s Allison who offers an angry retort. “That’s not fair and you know it,” she says, flushing a little. “You can’t hold us responsible for what Kate did. She abandoned the code.”

“She’s a murderer,” Derek says, voice tight with emotion.

“She’s a fucking psycho,” Allison replies. There are bright spots on both her cheeks. Stiles hasn’t seen her this worked up in ages. “So is Gerard. My father tried to make things right. She’s been declared anathema.Any person abiding by the code will hand her over.”

“And yet no one ever found a trace of her,” Laura says, voice cool. “So you’ll forgive me if I doubt the word of the Argent family.”

“My dad’s a Stilinski,” Stiles says. Everyone looks at him. “And my mom was an Argent, I guess, technically, but she was a Stilinski when she died. And not to play the sympathy card or anything, but I’ve never met Gerard and never heard of Kate, but my dad is a pretty decent guy and I’d like to find him alive. So if you’d help us, that would be great, but if not, you could maybe just let us look for him. Please.”

There’s a long silence at that. Laura is looking at him like she thinks she can read his mind if she stares at his face long enough. Derek’s expression is carefully blank, but his eyes widened a little in surprise when Stiles began speaking.

“Claudia was a good woman,” Laura finally says. “She and my mother had an agreement, of sorts. I’ll make a similar bargain with you.”

“What kind of bargain?” Allison says, suspicious.

“The best kind,” Laura says. “If you help us, we’ll help you.”

 

///

The problem the Hales are having, like most of the problems Stiles and Allison deal with, involves dead people. Dead kids, to be exact.

They’re all meeting in the back room of a bar that the Hales apparently own. Laura had been insistent that they chat on “neutral territory,” and Stiles can’t really blame her for not wanting to invite them all over.

Allison had filled him in on the Kate story on the car ride over.

“She’s our aunt,” she said. “The baby of the family. Gerard’s our grandfather.”

Stiles had known about Gerard, though he’d never been sure exactly why Grandpa Argent was not a welcome topic of conversation in the Argent-Stilinski household.

“She’s crazy,” Allison continued. “She thinks everything that isn’t human —everyone that’s different— deserves to die.”

“Is that why you were in Beacon Hills?” Stiles asked. He’d always wondered that, why Chris and Allison had shown up at the exact moment hell had broken lose. Allison gave a tight nod.

“Dad knew she was up to something, and was trying to stop her,” she said. “He didn’t realize that she was going to kill the Hales like that. He always thought Gerard was helping her, but no one’s ever been able to prove it.”

“And she wasn’t caught.”

Allison shook her head. “No, she wasn’t. But if she shows her face to any hunter who has a pretense of morals, then she’s a dead woman. She’s been declared anathema.” Anathema, the hunter equivalent of justice. Hard to take someone to court when they’d committed a crime against someone who wasn’t supposed to exist.

He thought the conversation was over, but it got worse. Allison hesitated, then said, “Dad always felt so guilty. Like it was his fault.” He thought she meant the Hales, but he realized she was talking about something else.

“Like if he hadn’t been so busy chasing Kate, maybe he would have come to see you guys. And then, what happened to your mom— the thing that got her—” she trailed off, unable to finish. Stiles felt sick to his stomach.

Now, in the Hales’ bar, he feels better because he has a problem to focus on. It probably— no, scratch that, it definitely— makes him a sick son of a bitch to be happy thinking about dead kids, but it’s better than thinking about his dead mother.

“Four deaths,” Laura is saying. “All in the span of six months. The police are calling it accidental, or copycat suicides, depending on who you talk to.”

“Heard that one before,” Stiles quips. Everyone ignores him, already immune to his sense of humor.

“All the deaths are in the same three-mile stretch of road,” Allison says, flipping through the files Laura has presented her with. “I’m guessing you already checked it out.”

Laura grimaces. “No scent of anything wrong. Nothing out of the ordinary. No trace of the supernatural that we can see.”

The big guy from earlier, who has turned out to be named Brandon, says, “Everyone was found drowned in the river. The bodies showed up different places, but as best we can tell they all came off of Cross Creek Bridge.”

“Any sign of struggle?” Allison asks.

Brandon shakes his head. “Not that we can tell.”

“So some kind of compulsion,” Stiles says. “Something’s forcing them to jump, or making them think they want to do it.” There are spells that can accomplish that, and probably plenty of weird creatures. Sirens can talk you into just about anything, and there are hundreds of water spirits.

“We’re counting on you to tell us what it is,” Laura says. She looks grimly determined. “If we know what it is, we know how to kill it. This is Hale territory, and we don’t put up with this bullshit.”

Stiles likes the attitude.

“Okay,” he says. “We’ll do our best.” They can handle this case, he has no doubt. This is a much more manageable problem than his disappearing father.

“Good,” Laura meets his gaze squarely and he has to look away. She has predator’s eyes, set in a human face. “Then we’ll help you with your problem.”

“We’ll get started first thing in the morning,” Allison says. “How can we be in touch with you?”

Laura’s reply is too casual to be unsuspicious. “You won’t need to. You’ll be working with Derek.”

“Derek?” Stiles says, trying to keep the surprise out of his voice.

“His job makes him the best choice,” she says. “And he’s a senior member of the pack.”

“So ah, what exactly do you do?” Stiles asks Derek directly. He’s been sitting next to Laura, silent the entire time. He’s definitely in some kind of manual labor. Maybe a mechanic? Or doing construction on one of the highways–

“I teach high school,” Derek says. His eyes are hazel, and the lashes around them are surprisingly long and dark. “At Beacon Hills High.”

Laura is smirking, so Stiles’ surprise must be evident. But he’s too busy thinking to be embarrassed—

“So that means?”

“That these were all my students,” Derek gives a little shrug, but his eyes look sad. “Yeah, they were. It’s not a big school.”

Stiles knows that firsthand. “I’m sorry,” he says, because he is. Derek shrugs.

“Just help us catch whatever it is that’s doing this.”

And okay, Stiles can handle that.

 

///

When he and Allison pull back into the motel parking lot for the second time that night, they make their way straight to the room next to theirs by mutual and unspoken accord.

“Keep an eye out,” Allison says curtly, and Stiles obliges, pretending to fiddle around with his cell phone while scanning the parking lot. It takes all of thirty seconds for her to pop the lock and usher them inside the damp room; to tell the truth, he’s surprised it even takes that long. He’d be more worried about their own safety if they didn’t have enough weapons between them to fuel an entire civil war in some Third World nation.

Inside, his father’s former motel room is eerily sparse. Stiles seriously doubts that housekeeping has been here any time recently, which means that the neatly made bed is all his father’s work. There’s nothing readily apparent to indicate that John Stilinski has been here, either two weeks ago or ever. That means they’re going to have to look harder.

“Room or bathroom?” Allison asks.

“Bathroom,” he says, because he’s standing closest to it anyway. It doesn’t take long for a cursory search to reveal what he’d long ago suspected: there’s his father’s cell, unplugged and battery long dead, left in a drawer next to the sink. There’s also a dead roach in there, too, and Stiles is choosing to believe that the placement of the two was unintentional.

“I found his cell,” he says when he emerges. Allison is sitting on the edge of the bed, flipping through something.

“It’s dead,” he adds.

She looks up at him and nods. “I figured as much. He must have figured we’d be tracking it.”

“What’s that?” Stiles asks, but as he crosses the room he realizes that he already knows: it’s his father’s notebook. Back when he was the Sheriff, it had been an ordinary three-ringed day planner, but over a decade later it was more like a case history and supernatural phonebook, all written in cryptic language doubly protected by his father’s almost illegible handwriting.

“It’s sure starting to feel like he meant for us to find this,” Stiles says, because the idea of his dad leaving a phone is just uncharacteristically sloppy, but the idea of him leaving this book somewhere is absurd. “If this is some ridiculous team building exercise and he pops out of the shower in our room, I’m going to be really pissed—”

The look on Allison’s face stops him mid-sentence. “Is that what you think this is?” she replies, voice brittle. “Some sick little ploy to get you back? Some fucking joke?”

“I was just kidding—” he tries to say, but she’s already up and stalking towards him, book tucked protectively under one arm.

“You left us, Stiles,” she says, and she’s right about that and she knows it. “You left us when we really needed you and and you didn’t come back, and we have done just fine without you all this time. So why don’t you just shut up and try to help instead of making everything into a punch line, okay?”

She’s standing way too close to him, and for a second he thinks she might actually hit him. He’d probably deserve it, if she did. He doesn’t know how to tell her that he makes the jokes because contemplating the alternative is worse—that’s just a road that leads to shortened breath and panic and general despair. She used to understand his jokes, once upon a time, but apparently they’ve both been gone a little too long, grown into different people.

“Okay,” he says, finally, swallowing in his suddenly dry throat. “Sorry.”

“The sooner we find him, the sooner you can leave again,” she says, and turns on her heel to leave the room. He trails after her. It’s a cheap shot but he’s not calling her on it. Besides, it’s not like it’s untrue.

There’s a second, when Allison opens the door to their motel room and reaches for the light, that Stiles realizes that something is suddenly wrong. The room is too still or not still enough; there’s a shadowed silhouette in the window that shouldn’t be there.

The light clicks on and several things happen in slow motion. One, the figure next to the window moves towards them, saying something. Two, Stiles reaches for his gun, draws it. Three, Allison reaches across the room and grabs the outstretched hand of the intruder, using it to propel him to the floor, where she puts a booted foot on his throat.

In reality, the entire thing probably took about two seconds, but it seems like a lot longer. In the interim, Stiles realizes that the mysterious figure —resolved into the shape of a lanky guy with floppy hair— is saying his name. Repeatedly, and with increasingly panicked volume. The pieces click into place.

“Scott?” he asks, incredulously. Time has apparently been very, very kind to Scott McCall. Judging by the glowing eyes he is also sporting, time has also made him a werewolf.

“You know him?” Allison asks. She puts a little more weight on Scott’s throat and he abruptly stops speaking at all.

“Yeah, I know him,” he says. “It’s okay, you can let him up.”

She does so, warily, now holding a particularly large and sharp-looking knife. Scott stays on the floor for a second, holding his hands up in what seems to be a pacifying gesture.

“Holy shit, dude,” he says at last. “Laura said they were just here and it was cool for me to come by. I didn’t expect you to get all Rambo on me.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have been lurking in our room,” Allison says. She looks like she might stab him, given enough encouragement. Stiles decides to intervene.

“Scott, good to see you,” he says. He thinks it’s true. Maybe. He actually hasn’t spoken to Scott since they left town, and he really wasn’t expecting him to turn up at all, let alone as some kind of supernatural midnight creeper.

Scott sits up, shakes his hair out of his eyes, and smiles goofily up at them like some kind of giant attractive puppy. “I was really excited to hear you were back, dude,” he says, enthusiastically. “I wanted to come by earlier, but Laura said I couldn’t until, uh—” he trails off, as if suddenly aware of how potentially awkward the topic is.

“We’ve been vetted,” Allison says crisply. “We’re working with your pack. That is, if you’re Hale pack. I take it Laura’s your alpha?”  
Scott nods. “Yeah, she is. She gave me the all-clear a little while ago.”

He turns his attention back to Stiles. “It’s good to see you,” he says. “How have you been? Where have you been?”

“Uh...” Stiles isn’t sure what to do with either this conversation or the overly warm greeting. Not that he and Scott weren’t BFFs in middle school, but it’s been twelve fucking years and a lot of damage since he felt that excited about seeing anybody.

“I’ve been good,” he finally offers. “Living in Texas. Austin.”

“Cool,” Scott says. He keeps sneaking glances at Allison, who is studiously ignoring him in favor of studying her knife.

“So, werewolf?” Stiles says, since it’s apparently his turn to start the conversation. “When did that happen?”

“After high school,” Scott says cheerfully. “Laura made me wait, even though she bit Isaac early.”

“Isaac?”

“Yeah, Isaac Lahey. I don’t know if you knew him. Anyway, she said there were ‘extenuating circumstances’ in his case. But I knew I wanted the bite for a couple years before.”

“How did you find out about werewolves?” Stiles asks, trying to wrap his head around the concept of wanting the bite enough to wait for it. Or of an alpha making someone graduate high school first.

Scott looks at him like he’s an idiot. “Cora, man. She was our year in school, remember? We started hanging out some, after— after you left.”

They both look away awkwardly at that. There’s a lot unsaid in that pause, probably too much. The conversation starts and stops a few more times, but Scott finally leaves, after securing a promise that he and Stiles will catch up ‘properly’ ‘some other time.’ Stiles intends to leave town long before that fabled moment can arrive, but he doesn’t tell Scott that.

“You’re friend is a dumbass,” Allison grumbles. She doesn’t seem to be holding a grudge about their earlier conversation, but Stiles feels it hanging in the air like acrid smoke or burnt plastic.

“He’s all right,” he says. He feels like he needs to at least say something to clear the air. He owes her that much. She seems bent on ignoring him, searching the various drawers for the TV remote.

“Al,” he says, using the nickname to get her attention. “Listen, about earlier. I mean, what happened when I left—”

“Stop,” Allison says immediately, holding up a hand to silence him. “We are not sixth grade girls at a slumber party, Stiles. We are not having this conversation.”

He tries again. “I know it couldn’t have been easy...”

“I will knock you unconscious and leave you in the trunk,” Allison says in a voice that’s all threat, because apparently her aversion to feelings extends to all deep emotional conversations and not just traumatic ones.

“Okay,” Stiles says, giving up.

She relaxes immediately. “Want to watch Law & Order?”

Apparently some things never change. Law & Order is one of them. Stiles hasn’t seen an episode since he left home, but he’s comforted by the fact that none of the characters look a day older. It’s easy to find his place in this story.

 

///

“Derek’s going to meet us after school today,” Allison says over breakfast. They’re back at the same diner they ate at last night. It’s close and it’s convenient, and even though Stiles knows, rationally, that he might look like his mother but no one is going to look at him and immediately think of a kid that disappeared from town fourteen years ago, eating off the beaten path eases his paranoia.

“Great,” Stiles says. “So what are we going to do for the next seven hours?”

“Try to interview some people,” Allison says. “Figure out what the hell is going on here.”

They wind up at the Beacon Hills Public Library, and if the fluorescent lighting isn’t the easiest on the eyes, the room is at least clean and doesn’t smell like mold and imminent death. Once there, they do what they always do: assemble a profile. Allison may be his father’s pride and joy, the one who is a better shot, a quicker pupil, but Stiles is sure as hell the better researcher. He’s good at this, the patient sifting through facts, piecing together the parts into a crooked whole. He wonders if this is what his father loved about police work, before everything went to hell: the feeling of making something into a unity, tidying up the mess the universe has left behind.

The Hale pack is right: the four deaths have all been on the same stretch of road. The first one, almost exactly six months ago, occured just after the beginning of the school year. Ryan Shepard crashed his car off Cross Creek Road, but his body was later pulled out of the river. According to the newspaper articles, police surmised that he’d been concussed and confused, staggering off from the crash site and accidentally falling into the river, where he drowned.

Two months later, his girlfriend jumped off the bridge herself. That was evidently suicide, a star crossed teenage romance gone wrong. Tragic, but not necessarily cause for alarm.

Except that two more teenagers had been pulled out of the river since then. One, Justin Morris, had been at a party in the woods. They thought he’d set off to walk home, but they found the body downriver three days later. The last death, three weeks ago, had been another girl. She didn’t show up for cheerleading practice, launching a county-wide panic. And, sure enough, they’d found her drowned body 36 hours after she’d been due for practice. There was no tidy explanation for her demise, and that had to be at least part of the town’s hysteria.

Stiles starts by casting his net wide, combing carefully for clues among the flotsam and jetsam. Without talking to Derek, he can’t decide if there’s anything that connects the victims besides the obvious facts: all teenagers, all BHHS students. So he starts with the other commonality: the river.

It turns out that there are a lot of water spirits, few of them nice. There’s also the possibility of a spell, but Stiles is putting that one on the backburner for now. There are less messy ways of killing someone by magic, and public drowning suggests that there’s something important in the location itself.

“It’s probably not a phooka,” he tells Allison, “Because they usually turn into some kind of demon horse that you can’t get off of. And I’m having a lot of trouble imagining some 21st century kid getting on the back of a random horse, especially one that talks.”

Another thought strikes him. “Could the Hales smell a phooka?” He makes a note to ask Derek. Allison, however, has had enough research for one day.

“Come on,” she says, insistently. “This place smells like old people. Let’s get out of here.”

 

///

“Getting out of here,” turns out to be code for, ‘let’s find a secluded part of the Preserve so I can kick the crap out of you.’

They go several rounds, sparring like they always have, and as they progress it quickly becomes apparent that Stiles is badly, badly out of practice and that Allison is just getting warmed up.

He knows it’s his own fault. It had been easy in Austin to let his guard down. It’s a relatively safe city, supernaturally speaking, and whatever problems had been going on around there weren’t his to deal with. He’d only been in one fight since leaving home, when some guy in a bar got too handsy with one of his friends and then wanted to finish things in the parking lot. Stiles had dropped him with two punches, because, like most bullies, he was all bravado and hadn’t had much actual fight training. Up against Allison, however, it’s a different story.

“Out. Of. Practice,” Stiles pants, hands on his knees while Allison patiently waits for him to recover enough to become her human punching bag again.

“I noticed,” she says dryly. “Maybe you should join a dojo.”

That’s clearly a joke, since the kind of fighting they do is a lot less disciplined than karate.

“You fight how you train,” his father always said. He told them a story about a guy in the Academy who got shot because he never dropped his clips during practice at the firing range. He was worried about them getting dirty, so he stuffed them in his pocket or held them in one hand. Then he died on the job, because when he was in a real firefight, he tried to do the same thing on instinct. The Argent-Stilinskis always dropped clips. They also spent a lot of time learning how to hurt people as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

Allison proves this when she and Stiles face off again. He gives up after the third well-timed blow (and god, is that going to bruise) and kisses his dignity goodby when she neatly flips him. He lands on his back with a thud and lies there for a while, panting. The trees are making nice patterns against the sky; there’s a jet leaving a snail trail in the distance.

“You going to lay there all day?” Allison asks, but he thinks she’s probably done for the moment, too. She comes to stand over him and he puts a hand around her ankle and squeezes it, affectionately.

Partly she’s just better because she’s been doing it longer; as he used to joke, she’s been trained from birth to be a stone cold killer. She’s basically Elektra. The other part of it, though, is that Allison is smaller than him, weighs less. She is always going to look like a much easier target, and if she wants to survive she has to be twice as good and twice as vicious.

Above him, Allison suddenly tenses, looks up. He hears it, too: the telltale crunch of feet on leaves, indicating that they’re not alone.

Stiles pushes himself up on his elbows quickly, but it turns out to just be Derek Hale, accompanied by a boy who’s too clearly a younger, lankier version of him to be anything but a relative.

“Cool,” says the boy, who can’t be more than fifteen, at the most. “I didn’t think humans sparred, too.”

“They’re hunters,” Derek reminds him, but there’s no malice in the comment. “They spar for the same reasons we do.”

“Because they’re paranoid?” The kid says, and dodges Derek’s attempt to cuff him, which means that he’s preoccupied when Derek trips him easily, send him rolling unharmed to a stop on the forest floor. Stiles sympathizes, he really does.

“Because they don’t want people to be able to do that,” Derek says, and then, to Stiles and Allison. “Meet Patrick. My cousin. I thought he could fill us in on some background, since he goes to BHHS.”

By now, Patrick has bounced back to his feet. He doesn’t seem too perturbed about his fall, instead sidling up to Allison and saying, “I heard you kicked Scott’s ass.”

Stiles doesn’t know whether to find his naivety endearing or annoying. Plainly, neither does Allison.

While she’s busy with Patrick, Derek leans over Stiles and offers him a hand. Stiles hesitates just a second before taking it. Derek hauls him to his feet as easily as if Stiles weighed nothing, and Stiles tries not to find that attractive.

“Looks like Scott isn’t the only one she can take down,” the werewolf says. His voice is pleasant, pitched low for Stiles’ ears.

“She’s a force of nature,” Stiles agrees, because the other man isn’t criticizing him and, even if he was, Stiles doesn’t give a fuck about manly pride or whatever. Hell, Allison could probably kick Derek’s ass, if she got the drop on him.

Derek looks at Stiles a little too long, like he can read his thoughts. Stiles knows intellectually that werewolves are attentive to body language, scent, and heartbeat, so it’s probably normal for him. For Stiles, however, it’s a little too much like being stared at by a dude that he finds way too attractive for comfort, so he tries not to flush or fidget. He isn’t entirely successful. Derek looks like he’s about to say something, but changes his mind when Patrick calls out to them.

“Hey, are you guys coming, or what? I still have homework to do.”

 

///

They wind up back at the diner, where Patrick inhales a cheeseburger and a plate of fries like he’s never eaten before in his life.

Allison and Derek have a cup of coffee, Stiles sticks to water. Caffeine puts him to sleep and that’s the last thing he needs right now.

It turns out that Patrick is useful, but mostly because he’s Facebook friends with half of the high school. He turns the laptop over to Allison willingly enough, though he apparently declined to let Derek just have his login information.

“Like I’m going to give that to you,” he says, scornfully. “It’s bad enough that he teaches at the same school.”

“You have a rough life,” Derek tells him, deadpan.

Patrick rolls his eyes. “You would have hated it if Laura had been a teacher at your school,” he says. “Not to mention that your presence seriously hampers my social life.”

“Like you were going to try out for lacrosse anyway,” Derek says. He glances over to where Allison is frowning slightly, eyes on whatever’s on the screen in front of her. A part of Stiles is dying to snatch the computer back from her, but he resists the impulse. Just because he’s better at research doesn’t mean Allison is stupid, and he’ll have his turn soon enough. Now, apparently, he’s just supposed to be talking to Derek.

“Do you help out with lacrosse?” Stiles asks.

“He’s the assistant coach,” Patrick says mournfully. “He’ll be the real coach, once Finstock finally retires.”

“Finstock’s never retiring,” Derek replies. He doesn’t sound too bothered by it. “I’ll be assistant coaching until he dies on the bus at some away game, forty years from now.”

“And you teach, too?” Stiles is aware this is getting a little personal, but he’s curious. He takes a guess. “Health? Gym?”

Patrick snorts, and Derek gives Stiles an amused look.

“US and World History,” he says. “I was an English major, actually. But coaches always teach history here.”

Stiles flushes a little. “That’s cool,” he says. “Sorry, I’m an ass for making stereotypical assumptions.”

“It happens,” Derek says, shrugging. He doesn’t seem offended. “I take it you never played sports.”

“No,” Stiles says, wanting to laugh at the thought. “I’m not super coordinated, dude. I thought you caught on when you saw Allison in action. She inherited all of that skillset.”

He plays with a straw paper. Allison’s still clicking away on Facebook, and she leans over to ask Patrick a question about something.

“I majored in anthropology, actually,” Stiles says. “Down in Austin. That’s where I’m living. I’m thinking about going to grad school, but who knows? I may wind up teaching history, too.” It’s important to him, suddenly, to clarify to Derek that he and Allison aren’t who the Hales have assumed they are.

“So you’re not interested in carrying on the family business?” Derek asks, glancing over at where Patrick is hunched over the laptop with Allison.

Stiles doesn’t know how to put it into words without lying or obviously revealing too much, so he finally settles on, “I was ready for a change.”

Derek nods, slowly, like that’s something he can understand.

 

Derek sends Patrick home, protesting, after they’ve exhausted all the information available from Facebook.

“It’s so far,” Patrick whines. “Can’t I take the car?”

Derek drives the black Camaro Stiles saw outside the diner; it explains how the Hales knew they were here to begin with. Derek just stares back at him, like the question is so stupid that he isn’t even going to answer it.

“Exercise is good for you,” he states. “And if you’re too late to help with dinner, your dad is going to kill you.”

That gets Patrick started sullenly out the door, clutching his backpack.

“He’ll be fine,” Derek tells Allison and Stiles, like it matters what they think. “It’s only a few miles, and for us it’s nothing. He just likes to be overly dramatic.”

“Family,” Stiles says by way of commiseration, shaking his head. Allison doesn’t reply.

“All I could figure out from Patrick’s Facebook was that all these kids knew each other, and that they were all friends.”

“Not hard in a town this small,” Derek says. “Ryan was on the lacrosse team. They were all pretty popular.”

“Well-liked?” Allison says.

“Popular,” Derek clarifies firmly. “Ryan was kind of an asshole, frankly. He fulfilled most of the jock stereotypes. He and Justin were a pain.”

“It’s not the victims we should be looking at,” Stiles insists. “It’s the place that’s significant. There’s something important about that stretch of river.”

He opens his notebook, looking at the list he’d made from his library research. There’s the list of questions he’d made to ask Derek, so he starts with the first one.

“Could you smell a phooka?” he says, as business-like as it is possible to be when asking that question.

“A what?” Derek says.

“It’s a kind of Celticwater spirit,” Stiles says. “Could you smell it?”

“It wasn’t anything like that,” Derek insists.

“How do you know?” Stiles looks at his notes. “There are like, hundreds of nasty things that live in the water. NIxies! Kelpies! Naiads, though I’m not sure those are real. Rusalkas!Are you sure it isn’t some kind of angry supernatural creature? And how do you know what a phooka smells like, if you don’t even know what one is?”

Allison is unfazed by this flow of information, but Derek is staring at Stiles like he’s suddenly sprouted wings.

“I don’t even know where to start,” he says. “Look, I know what magic smells like. And I don’t need to identify a scent to recognize that there is a weird scent somewhere. And there wasn’t. It was just human, and it stopped at the same spot, on the bridge.”

Stiles isn’t entirely convinced, but decides that he has better things to do than argue with Derek about this, especially when there’s no way to prove him wrong... yet.

“Patrick mentioned something about a local legend,” Allison says. “Apparently kids at school are talking about it.”

Derek rolls his eyes so hard they’re going to fall out of his head. “Please tell me you didn’t take him seriously. They’ve been telling that one since my uncle was in school.”

He looks at Stiles for confirmation: “The White Lady? Who stops your car, or asks you for a ride?”

“I’d forgotten about that,” Stiles says, slowly. He can definitely remember hearing someone tell it, though, at a sleepover with Scott back in the day. “She’s supposed to be up on Clearview Drive, though.”

“She’s apparently moved,” Derek says. “If the student body is to be believed.”

“You don’t sound convinced,” Allison says.

Derek shakes his head, frustrated. “This is Hale land. I’ve lived here all my life, so has my family. I think we’d know if some malevolent spirit had been hovering around killing people on our territory for the past sixty years.”

“Besides,” Stiles adds, “There’s one in every culture. Down in Texas and Mexico she’s La Llorona. And it’s never someone you know who died. It’s always your cousin’s friend’s schoolmate, or some girl the next school over.”

He looks down at his notes. “Phookas, on the other hand.”

Derek actually groans.

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger Warnings: This fic contains canon-typical violence, panic attacks, mentions of suicide & suicide attempts, descriptions of teenage bullying and depression, and the usual canonical Hale fire related trauma.
> 
> I'm on tumblr as gettexty. Come find me so we can talk about how pretty Allison's hair is.


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